While APIs are the fundamental technology to enable automation in the cloud, organizations don’t need to be experts in APIs or programming languages to leverage automation.
Several open-source and commercial automation frameworks simplify the complexity of communicating with an API. These tools fall into two general categories:
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – Generally focuses on provisioning, modifying, and destroying primitives in an environment, like networking, storage, and compute resources.
Configuration Management - Configuration Management generally focuses on managing the configuration of a resource already deployed, like an operating system or a networking device.
These categories are helpful when identifying which automation tools are the best fit for a specific task, but organizations should be aware that many automation tools have capabilities that could be categorized as both IaC and Configuration Management. In other words, the lines are frequently blurred between these two categories, but it is still worth understanding the difference between the two.
